Lot Essay
Louise Bourgeois turned to sculpture in the late 1940s when the constraints of the two-dimensional canvas and the inherent abstraction of painting proved too limiting as a means of expression. Bourgeois' work, rooted in the Surrealist tradition, expresses an underlying psychological and emotional sensibility, allowing the artist to create while exploring and exorcizing the unconscious.
Bourgeois, the middle child of a domineering father and devoted mother, relates the thrust of her work to her early childhood and the family that openly included her father's mistress, once Bourgeois' English tutor. The tense, overt sexual dynamics had a powerful impact on the artist who would devote her career to exploring physical and psychological relationships and the subtle sexual politics within them.
Untitled, 1953 is a remarkable example of Bourgeois' mature style, emblematic of the formal issues she continues to express throughout her work and aesthetic vocabulary. The work consists of many distinct wood elements piled up on one another connected by a steel rod, composing a slender, human-scale column. Bourgeois has stacked the variously-sized elements neatly with the round forms rising vertically from a square base into a rounded, polished tip. As in many of her works from this time, "opposing and facing surfaces cut at a slant suggest mutual affection and repulsion within a shared fate" (C. Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois, Zurich 1992, p. 61). The relationship between the parts succeeds in creating a figure that appears to emerge from the ground on which it is directly placed. The resulting tower achieves height and a strength of autonomy if but through a precariously balanced composition. Though human in scale, the work evokes even grander images of ancient obelisks and totems as well as the modernist skyscrapers of Bourgeois' adopted home, Manhattan.
Untitled remains inherently figural as well, becoming a solitary slender form not unlike Giacommetti's slim figures from the 1940s. Bourgeois' rounded elements, moveable on their hidden spine, comprise a limbless body which stands on a pedestal. It is the human form elevated as art object, iconography redefined. Although Bourgeois would come to explore sexuality and the human body more overtly in her later sculptures, Untitled shares a natural sensuality with the best of her works. The elements are enticingly tactile, their organic surfaces smooth yet roughly hewn. Bourgeois couples and nestles the elements together, thrusting the form upward in a vertical mass, penetrating the negative space which surrounds it. This organic form, almost feminine with its rounded smooth forms, exudes virility from its phallic silhouette.
Untitled represents a clear articulation of the formal and psychological issues that Bourgeois would explore throughout her career, and which continue to interest her today. Untitled seems at once to be a meditation on independence and codependence, on form and metaphor, and subtler relationships between the sexes. "Bourgeois' sculptures are filled with a life not entirely familiar even to the artist herself. The figures give shape and voice to a monstrous mental game, relentlessly pursuing an obsessive thought until it finally assumes a physical, sculptural gestalt... For Bourgeois, sculpture is an exorcism, an emotional catharsis" (ibid, p. 61). Indeed, the catharsis which became Untitled emerges as a modern relic of the artistic process, a powerful totem of the Bourgeois' emergence as a sculptor.
Bourgeois, the middle child of a domineering father and devoted mother, relates the thrust of her work to her early childhood and the family that openly included her father's mistress, once Bourgeois' English tutor. The tense, overt sexual dynamics had a powerful impact on the artist who would devote her career to exploring physical and psychological relationships and the subtle sexual politics within them.
Untitled, 1953 is a remarkable example of Bourgeois' mature style, emblematic of the formal issues she continues to express throughout her work and aesthetic vocabulary. The work consists of many distinct wood elements piled up on one another connected by a steel rod, composing a slender, human-scale column. Bourgeois has stacked the variously-sized elements neatly with the round forms rising vertically from a square base into a rounded, polished tip. As in many of her works from this time, "opposing and facing surfaces cut at a slant suggest mutual affection and repulsion within a shared fate" (C. Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois, Zurich 1992, p. 61). The relationship between the parts succeeds in creating a figure that appears to emerge from the ground on which it is directly placed. The resulting tower achieves height and a strength of autonomy if but through a precariously balanced composition. Though human in scale, the work evokes even grander images of ancient obelisks and totems as well as the modernist skyscrapers of Bourgeois' adopted home, Manhattan.
Untitled remains inherently figural as well, becoming a solitary slender form not unlike Giacommetti's slim figures from the 1940s. Bourgeois' rounded elements, moveable on their hidden spine, comprise a limbless body which stands on a pedestal. It is the human form elevated as art object, iconography redefined. Although Bourgeois would come to explore sexuality and the human body more overtly in her later sculptures, Untitled shares a natural sensuality with the best of her works. The elements are enticingly tactile, their organic surfaces smooth yet roughly hewn. Bourgeois couples and nestles the elements together, thrusting the form upward in a vertical mass, penetrating the negative space which surrounds it. This organic form, almost feminine with its rounded smooth forms, exudes virility from its phallic silhouette.
Untitled represents a clear articulation of the formal and psychological issues that Bourgeois would explore throughout her career, and which continue to interest her today. Untitled seems at once to be a meditation on independence and codependence, on form and metaphor, and subtler relationships between the sexes. "Bourgeois' sculptures are filled with a life not entirely familiar even to the artist herself. The figures give shape and voice to a monstrous mental game, relentlessly pursuing an obsessive thought until it finally assumes a physical, sculptural gestalt... For Bourgeois, sculpture is an exorcism, an emotional catharsis" (ibid, p. 61). Indeed, the catharsis which became Untitled emerges as a modern relic of the artistic process, a powerful totem of the Bourgeois' emergence as a sculptor.